Illegal and illiberal immigration exists and will continue to expand because too many special interests are invested in it. It is one of those rare anomalies — the farm bill is another — that crosses political party lines and instead unites disparate elites through their diverse but shared self-interests: live-and-let-live profits for some and raw political power for others. For corporate employers, millions of poor foreign nationals ensure cheap labor, with the state picking up the eventual social costs. For Democratic politicos, illegal immigration translates into continued expansion of favorable political demography in the American Southwest. For ethnic activists, huge annual influxes of unassimilated minorities subvert the odious melting pot and mean continuance of their own self-appointed guardianship of salad-bowl multiculturalism. Meanwhile, the upper middle classes in coastal cocoons enjoy the aristocratic privileges of having plenty of cheap household help, while having enough wealth not to worry about the social costs of illegal immigration in terms of higher taxes or the problems in public education, law enforcement, and entitlements. No wonder our elites wink and nod at the supposed realities in the current immigration bill, while selling fantasies to the majority of skeptical Americans. Victor Davis Hanson

Who are the bigots — the rude and unruly protestors who scream and swarm drop-off points and angrily block immigration authority buses to prevent the release of children into their communities, or the shrill counter-protestors who chant back “Viva La Raza” (“Long Live the Race”)? For that matter, how does the racialist term “La Raza” survive as an acceptable title of a national lobby group in this politically correct age of anger at the Washington Redskins football brand? How can American immigration authorities simply send immigrant kids all over the United States and drop them into communities without firm guarantees of waiting sponsors or family? If private charities did that, would the operators be jailed? Would American parents be arrested for putting their unescorted kids on buses headed out of state? Liberal elites talk down to the cash-strapped middle class about their illiberal anger over the current immigration crisis. But most sermonizers are hypocritical. Take Nancy Pelosi, former speaker of the House. She lectures about the need for near-instant amnesty for thousands streaming across the border. But Pelosi is a multimillionaire, and thus rich enough not to worry about the increased costs and higher taxes needed to offer instant social services to the new arrivals. Progressives and ethnic activists see in open borders extralegal ways to gain future constituents dependent on an ever-growing government, with instilled grudges against any who might not welcome their flouting of U.S. laws. How moral is that? Likewise, the CEOs of Silicon Valley and Wall Street who want cheap labor from south of the border assume that their own offspring’s private academies will not be affected by thousands of undocumented immigrants, that their own neighborhoods will remain non-integrated, and that their own medical services and specialists’ waiting rooms will not be made available to the poor arrivals. … What a strange, selfish, and callous alliance of rich corporate grandees, cynical left-wing politicians, and ethnic chauvinists who have conspired to erode U.S. law for their own narrow interests, all the while smearing those who object as xenophobes, racists, and nativists. Victor Davis Hanson

It has been Cohen’s longstanding contention that the term moral panic is, for its utility, problematic insofar as the term ‘panic’ implies an irrational reaction which a researcher is rejecting in the very act of labelling it such. That was the case when he was studying the media coverage of the Mods and Rockers and when Young was studying the reaction to drug taking in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Currently , Cohen has started to feel uncomfortable with the blanket application the term ’panic’ in the study of any reactions to deviance, as he argues for its possible use in ‘good moral panics’. Cohen discusses the changes that have occurred in society and how this has had re-directed the ‘moral panic’ analysis and has contributed to the development of the concept. To begin with, the modern moral entrepreneurs have adopted a status similar to the social analyst (in terms of class, education and ideology) and the likelihood for the two of them to perceive the problem in the same way has increased substantially. Secondly, the alliances between the various political forces has become more flexible and as a result, panics about ‘genuine’ victims (of natural disasters or terrorist attacks) are more likely to generate consensus that the ‘unworthy’ victims (the homeless). Thirdly, whereas the traditional moral panics where in nature elite-engineered, the contemporary ones are much more likely to populist-based, giving more space for social movements’ and victims’ participation in the process. Fourthly, in contrast to the old moral panics, the new ones are interventionist-focused. The new criminalizers who address the moral panics are either post-liberals who share a common background with a decriminalized generation, or are from the new right who argue for increased focus on private morality (sexuality, abortion, lifestyle). In addition, Cohen considers the possibility of certain moral panics being understood as ‘anti-denial’ movements. In contemporary times the denial of certain events, their cover-up, evasion and tolerance is perceived as morally wrong, and such denied realities should be brought to the public attention, which would result in widespread moral condemnation and denunciation. In this sense, it could be argued that certain panics should also be considered as ‘acceptable’ and thus a binarity between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ moral panics can be developed. Such as heuristic between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ can be useful as such a distinction in effect widens the scope of moral panic studies beyond those examples that are regarded as ‘inappropriate’ and ‘irrational’. Potentially, this could also lead to the questioning of the notions of rationality, disproportionality and other normative judgements that have characterised the studies of moral panics. Such an approach of analysing ‘moral panics’ is in contrast with the work of Critcher, to whom the concept of can be best understood in the relations of power and regulation. Whereas both Critcher and Cohen agree that each moral panic should be seen in a wider conceptual framework, the latter does not adopt Critcher’s suggestion that the term ‘moral’ panic should not be applied in cases where dominant elites reinforce dominant practices by way of scapegoating outsiders. By contrast to Critcher, Cohen accepts the possibility of counter-hegemonic moral panics. In addition, Critcher stresses the need to focus not only on the politics of moral panics, but also consider the economic factors that might limit or promote their development. Moving beyond moral panics, Hunt has argued that a shift has taken place in the processes of moral regulation over the past century, whereby the boundaries that separate morality from immorality have been blurred. As a result, an increasing number of everyday activities have become moralized and the expression of such moralization can be found in hybrid configurations of risk and harm. The moralization of everyday life contains a dialectic that counterposes individualizing discourses against collectivizing discourses and moralization has become an increasingly common feature of contemporary political discourse. Moral panics can also be seen as volatile manifestations of an ongoing project of moral regulation, where the ‘moral’ is represented as practices that are specifically designed to promote the care of the self. With the shift towards neo-liberalism, such regulatory scripts have taken the form of discourses of risk, harm and personal responsibility. As Hier the implementation of such a ‘personalization’ discourse is not straightforward due to the fact that moral callings are not always accepted. The moral codes that are supposed to regulate behaviour, expression and self-presentation are themselves contestable and their operation is not bound in a time-space frame. Thus, ‘moralization’ is conceptualized as a recurrent sequence of attempts to negotiate social life; a temporary ‘crisis’ of the ‘code’ (moral panic) is therefore far more routine than extraordinary. The problems with such an argument for expanding the focus of moral panics to encompass forms of moral regulation is that it is too broad and a more specific scope of moral regulation should be defined in order to conduct such analysis. Dimitar Panchev (2013)

« We do more workshops in middle schools than in high schools, » says Bell, executive director of Bebashi-Transition to Hope, the local nonprofit that works on prevention of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. « Teachers call us because their kids are acting out sexually. They’ll catch them in the bathroom or the stairwell. They hear that kids are cutting schools to have orgies. » (…) « We follow 200 teenagers with HIV, and the youngest is 12, » says Jill Foster, director of the Dorothy Mann Center for Pediatric and Adolescent HIV at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. « When we started doing HIV treatment in 1998, the average age of patients was 16 or 17. The first time we got a 13-year-old was mind-blowing. » (…) Because a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified Philadelphia as having the earliest age of sexual initiation – 13 – among cities participating in the study, she says, it’s crucial to make condoms available to younger kids. People gasp at that, says Foster, who diagnoses new HIV cases at a rate of two to three teens a month, up from one every four months just a decade ago. « But people have no idea how tough it is to be a kid who’s exposed to sexual media images and peer pressure. It’s routine for 12- and 13-year-olds to talk about sex. Younger kids hear them and they want to be part of that ‘older’ world, » she says. « They don’t have maturity or impulse control, so if we can get them to have condoms with them when they start having sex, they are going to be safer. « I wish it weren’t necessary, » she says. « Unfortunately, it is. » It would be easy to play the « appalled citizen » card and decry the inclusion of kids as young as 11 in Philadelphia’s STD-prevention campaign. But I won’t. Because there are two groups of children in this city: Those lucky enough to have at least one caring, available adult to guide them through sex-charged adolescence. And those left on their own. Like the child being raised by a single mom whose two jobs keep her from supervising her child. Or the kids being raised by a tired grandmom who’s asleep by 9 and doesn’t know that the kids have snuck out of the house. Or the homeless teen who crashes on couches and must choose between saying no to a friend’s creepy uncle or wandering the streets at night. These kids deserve protection from the fallout of STDs and unplanned pregnancy as much as kids from « good » families do – kids who, by the way, get in trouble, too. They just have more support to get them through it. « We know that sexual activity in young adolescents doesn’t change overnight, » says Donald Schwarz, a physician who worked with adolescents for years at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia before being appointed city health commissioner in 2008. « But children need to be protected while we get our heads around whatever the long-term strategies should be here. » He mentions a recent, awful survey of sixth-graders in West Philly, which showed that 25 percent of the children, who were just 11 years old, had had sex. « Clearly, we don’t think it’s OK for 11-year-olds to be having sex, » says Schwarz. « But we don’t have the infrastructure in place to fix [that] problem fast. We can, however, make condoms available fairly quickly to whoever needs them. (…) There are no easy solutions. This is a complicated problem, exacerbated by generational poverty and family collapse that paralyzes our cities in ways too myriad to address in one column.Ronnie Polaneczky

Giving out free condoms at school is not a surefire way to avoid teenage pregnancy – or it might not be enough. Access to condoms in schools increases teen fertility rates by about 10 per cent, according to a new study by the University Of Notre Dame. However the increase happened in schools where no counseling was provided when condoms were given out – and giving out guidance as well as birth control could have the opposite effect, economists Kasey Buckles and Daniel Hungerman said in the study. Access to other kinds of birth control, such as the contraceptive pill, IUDs and implants, has been shown to lower teen fertility rates – but condoms might have opposite consequences due to their failure rate as well as the time and frequency at which they’re used. (…) Times have changed already and teenagers today are overall less likely to have sex and less likely to become pregnant, they wrote. Most of the free condoms programs in the study began in 1992 or 1993 and about two thirds involved mandatory counseling. The 10 per cent increased occurred as a result of schools that gave out condoms without counseling, Buckles and Hungerman said. ‘These fertility effects may have been attenuated, or perhaps even reversed, when counseling was mandated as part of condom provision,’ they wrote. Teenage girls were also more likely to develop gonorrhea when condoms were given for free – and again, the increase happened as a result of schools giving out condoms without counseling. Access to contraceptives in general has been shown to lower teen fertility, Buckles and Hungerman noted, or in some cases had no effect at all. But condoms might have a different impact because of several factors, such as the fact that their failure rate is more important than that of other contraceptives. Condoms also rely ‘more heavily on the male partner’, which is an important factor given that an unplanned pregnancy will have different consequences for each gender, Buckle and Hungerman wrote. The time at which condoms are used could also explain why they have a different impact than other types of birth control. Condoms have to be used at the time of intercourse, whereas the pill, IUDs and implants are all taken in advance. Using condoms also results from a short-term decision rather than long-term. Free condom programs in schools could have led to two additional births per 1,000 teenage women so far, Buckle and Hungerman found. This could increase to 5 extra births per 1,000 teenage girls if the country’s entire high-school-aged population had access to condoms. Condom distribution programs could promote the use of condoms over more efficient birth control methods, drive schools to use their resources for condom distribution rather than more effective programs, or might encourage ‘risky’ sexual behaviors, Buckle and Hungerman wrote.Daily Mail

A man who drove a van into a crowd of Muslims near a London mosque has been found guilty of murder. Darren Osborne, 48, ploughed into people in Finsbury Park in June last year, killing Makram Ali, 51, and injuring nine others. Osborne, from Cardiff, was also found guilty of attempted murder and is due to be sentenced on Friday. (…) Police later found a letter in the van written by Osborne, referring to Muslim people as « rapists » and « feral ». He also wrote that Muslim men were « preying on our children ». The trial heard Osborne became « obsessed » with Muslims in the weeks leading up to the attack, having watched the BBC drama Three Girls, about the Rochdale grooming scandal. BBC

I’m a Rotherham grooming gang survivor. (…) I’m part of the UK’s largest ever child sexual abuse investigation. As a teenager, I was taken to various houses and flats above takeaways in the north of England, to be beaten, tortured and raped over 100 times. I was called a “white slag” and “white c***” as they beat me. They made it clear that because I was a non-Muslim, and not a virgin, and because I didn’t dress “modestly”, that they believed I deserved to be “punished”. They said I had to “obey” or be beaten. (…) Like terrorists, they firmly believe that the crimes they carry out are justified by their religious beliefs. Experts say that grooming gangs are not the same as paedophile rings. It’s something that central Government really needs to understand in order to prevent more grooming gang crime in the future. In November 2017, the Swedish government held a meeting where they stated that: “Sexual violence is being used as a tactic of terrorism”, and as such, it was recognised as a threat to Sweden’s national security. The link between terrorism and rape undertaken by Islamist gangs was not being ignored. They called for counter-extremism education. This sounds like a balanced and intelligent governmental response to me. Religious indoctrination is a big part of the process of getting young men involved in grooming gang crime. Religious ideas about purity, virginity, modesty and obedience are taken to the extreme until horrific abuse becomes the norm. It was taught to me as a concept of “othering”. “Muslim girls are good and pure because they dress modestly, covering down to their ankles and wrists, and covering their crotch area. They stay virgins until marriage. They are our girls. « White girls and non-Muslim girls are bad because you dress like slags. You show the curves of your bodies (showing the gap between your thighs means you’re asking for it) and therefore you’re immoral. White girls sleep with hundreds of men. You are the other girls. You are worthless and you deserve to be gang-raped.” This hateful religious hypocrisy strikes people to their very core. But it’s far from unique. My main perpetrator quoted scriptures from the Quran to me as he beat me. (…) I experienced horrific, religiously sanctioned sexual violence and torture – so I definitely believe that we need to be aware of religious extremism as something potentially harmful, so that we can protect people from it. I witnessed the ways young men are groomed to become perpetrators by older grooming gang members. It’s very similar to the tactics used in grooming for terrorism, with love-bombing, emotive language (“brother”, “cuz”, “blud”), and promises of wealth and fame, then humiliation, controlling with guilt and shame, training with weapons, and instilling hate and fear of outsiders. Always, at the same time, they continue to convince these young men that they must find girls to be gang-raped too. Grooming gang crime is upheld by religious extremism. Like Sweden, we must officially recognise this, and work to curb extremist preaching, teach religious counter-narratives, give gendered extremism education and deliver quality relationships education, while learning the lessons from Prevent and Channel. We need a careful, considered approach that is respectful of the human rights of everyone.Rotherham grooming gang victim

By date of conviction, we have evidence of such exploitation taking place in Keighley (2005 and 2013), Blackpool (2006), Oldham (2007 and 2008), Blackburn (2007, 2008 and 2009), Sheffield (2008), Manchester (2008 and 2013) Skipton (2009), Rochdale (two cases in 2010, one in 2012 and another in 2013), Nelson (2010), Preston (2010) Rotherham (2010) Derby (2010), Telford (2012), Bradford (2012), Ipswich (2013), Birmingham (2013), Oxford (2013), Barking (2013) and Peterborough (2013). This is based on a trawl of news sources so is almost certainly incomplete. (…) Ceop data about the ethnicity of offenders and suspects identified by those 31 police forces in 2012 is incomplete. The unit says: “All ethnicities were represented in the sample. However, a disproportionate number of offenders were reported as Asian.” Of 52 groups where ethnicity data was provided, 26 (50 per cent) comprised all Asian offenders, 11 (21 per cent) were all white, 9 (17 per cent) groups had offenders from multiple ethnicities, 4 (8 per cent) were all black offenders and there were 2 (4 per cent) exclusively Arab groups. Of the 306 offenders whose ethnicity was noted, 75 per cent were categorised as Asian, 17 per cent white, and the remaining 8 per cent black (5 per cent) or Arab (3 per cent). By contrast, the seven “Type 2 groups” – paedophile rings rather than grooming gangs – “were reported as exclusively of white ethnicity”. Ceop identified 144 victims of the Type 1 groups. Again, the data was incomplete. Gender was mentioned in 118 cases. All were female. Some 97 per cent of victims were white. Girls aged between 14 and 15 accounted for 57 per cent of victims. Out of 144 girls, 100 had “at least one identifiable vulnerability” like alcohol or drug problems, mental health issues or a history of going missing. More than half of the victims were in local authority care. The 27 court cases that we found led to the convictions of 92 men. Some 79 (87 per cent) were reported as being of South Asian Muslim origin. Three were white Britons, two were Indian, three were Iraqi Kurds, four were eastern European Roma and one was a Congolese refugee, according to reports of the trials. Considerable caution is needed when looking at these numbers, as our sample is very unscientific. There are grooming cases we will have missed, and there will undoubtedly be offences that have not resulted in convictions. (…) Ceop says: “The comparative levels of freedom that white British children enjoy in comparison to some other ethnicities may make them more vulnerable to exploitation. “They may also be more likely to report abuse. This is an area requiring better data and further research.”Channel 4 news

Child sexual exploitation is one of the most sickening crimes of our age, yet the scale is unknown because, by its very nature, boys and girls frequently go missing in an underworld of systematic abuse. Barnardo’s has 22 projects across the country dedicated to finding and helping these young people, and has been campaigning for years to bring the issue to the forefront of the government’s agenda. The past weeks have seen a welcome shift in recognition of this problem, but the focus has been on the ethnicity of abusers, based on two high-profile cases in particular parts of England. It’s crucial to recognise that just as the ethnicity of the perpetrators differs across the UK, so does that of the children. We need to pull away from the growing stereotypes: it is not just Asian men who commit this crime, nor are the victims only white – black and Asian girls are targeted too. They are used like puppets by these abhorrent men and women – groomed and manipulated to a point where they are brainwashed, raped and scarred for life. I have met some very brave girls and boys who we are helping to overcome the tragic childhood that they will never get back. One of them is Aaliyah. Her story isn’t unusual. As 14 she began to become estranged from her parents and started to go out a lot. She was introduced to men older than her, who would impress her with their flash cars and gifts. Desperate for love and attention the affection they showed her seemed very real, until it turned nasty. The unthinkable cruelty she suffered will never be forgotten – Aaliyah was physically and mentally abused, with one so-called boyfriend pulling her out of his car by her hair and threatening to cut her legs off with an axe before driving her to a hotel room, « to have his friends come over and do what they wanted to me ». We worked with more than a thousand children and young people like Aaliyah last year, and we believe that is likely to be the tip of the iceberg. Wherever we have looked for exploitation, we have found it. We need to use the momentum of current debate to highlight what really matters: protecting these vulnerable children. It is 16 years since Barnardo’s opened its first service dedicated to sexually exploited children in Bradford. Today we release a report, Puppet on a String, that highlights three new issues: trafficking around the UK is becoming more common; sexual exploitation is more organised and grooming more sophisticated, with technology being used to find, isolate and control victims; and increasingly younger children are being abused. Emma’s sexual exploitation began in a similar way to Aaliyah’s. When, aged 14, she met a man in his early 30s who showered her with gifts and attention, she fell in love, but soon her « boyfriend » began abusing her and forcing her to sleep with different men. Her words are heartbreaking: « I just hoped that one day one of the men would be a real boyfriend, that he’d like me for the real me and that he’d want to save me. But it never happened. » Anne-Marie Carrie

By now surely everyone knows the case of the eight men convicted of picking vulnerable underage girls off the streets, then plying them with drink and drugs before having sex with them. A shocking story. But maybe you haven’t heard. Because these sex assaults did not take place in Rochdale, where a similar story led the news for days in May, but in Derby earlier this month. Fifteen girls aged 13 to 15, many of them in care, were preyed on by the men. And though they were not working as a gang, their methods were similar – often targeting children in care and luring them with, among other things, cuddly toys. But this time, of the eight predators, seven were white, not Asian. And the story made barely a ripple in the national media. Of the daily papers, only the Guardian and the Times reported it. There was no commentary anywhere on how these crimes shine a light on British culture, or how middle-aged white men have to confront the deep flaws in their religious and ethnic identity. Yet that’s exactly what played out following the conviction in May of the « Asian sex gang » in Rochdale, which made the front page of every national newspaper. Though analysis of the case focused on how big a factor was race, religion and culture, the unreported story is of how politicians and the media have created a new racial scapegoat. In fact, if anyone wants to study how racism begins, and creeps into the consciousness of an entire nation, they need look no further. (…) the intense interest in the Rochdale story arose from a January 2011 Times « scoop » that was based on the conviction of at most 50 British Pakistanis out of a total UK population of 1.2 million, just one in 24,000 (…) Even the Child Protection and Online Protection Centre (Ceop), which has also studied potential offenders who have not been convicted, has only identified 41 Asian gangs (of 230 in total) and 240 Asian individuals – and they are spread across the country. But, despite this, a new stereotype has taken hold: that a significant proportion of Asian men are groomers (and the rest of their communities know of it and keep silent). But if it really is an « Asian » thing, how come Indians don’t do it? If it’s a « Pakistani » thing, how come an Afghan was convicted in the Rochdale case? And if it’s a « Muslim » thing, how come it doesn’t seem to involve anyone of African or Middle Eastern origin? The standard response to anyone who questions this is: face the facts, all those convicted in Rochdale were Muslim. Well, if one case is enough to make such a generalisation, how about if all the members of a gang of armed robbers were white; or cybercriminals; or child traffickers? (All three of these have happened.) Would we be so keen to « face the facts » and make it a problem the whole white community has to deal with? Would we have articles examining what it is about Britishness or Christianity or Europeanness, that makes people so capable of such things? (…) Whatever the case, we know that abuse of white girls is not a cultural or religious issue because there is no longstanding history of it taking place in Asia or the Muslim world. How did middle-aged Asian men from tight-knit communities even come into contact with white teenage girls in Rochdale? The main cultural relevance in this story is that vulnerable, often disturbed, young girls, regularly out late at night, often end up in late-closing restaurants and minicab offices, staffed almost exclusively by men. After a while, relationships build up, with the men offering free lifts and/or food. For those with a predatory instinct, sexual exploitation is an easy next step. This is an issue of what men can do when away from their own families and in a position of power over badly damaged young people. It’s a story repeated across Britain, by white and other ethnic groups: where the opportunity arises, some men will take advantage. The precise method, and whether it’s an individual or group crime, depends on the particular setting – be they priests, youth workers or networks on the web. (…) if the tables were turned and the victims were Asian or Muslim, we would have been subjected to equally skewed « expert » commentary asking: what is wrong with how Muslims raise girls? Why are so many of them on the streets at night? Shouldn’t the community face up to its shocking moral breakdown? (…) We have been here before, of course: in the 1950s, West Indian men were labelled pimps, luring innocent young white girls into prostitution. By the 1970s and 80s they were vilified as muggers and looters. And two years ago, Channel 4 ran stories, again based on a tiny set of data, claiming there was an endemic culture of gang rape in black communities. The victims weren’t white, though, so media interest soon faded. It seems that these stories need to strike terror in the heart of white people for them to really take off. What is also at play here is the inability of people, when learning about a different culture or race, to distinguish between the aberrations of a tiny minority within that group, and the normal behaviour of a significant section. Some examples are small in number but can be the tip of a much wider problem: eg, knife crime, which is literally the sharp end of a host of problems affecting black communities ranging from family breakdown, to poverty, to low school achievement and social exclusion. Joseph Harker

In May 2012, nine men from the Rochdale area of Manchester were found guilty of sexually exploiting a number of underage girls. Media reporting on the trial focused on the fact that eight of the men were of Pakistani descent, while all the girls were white. Framing similar cases in Preston, Rotherham, Derby, Shropshire, Oxford, Telford and Middlesbrough as ethnically motivated, the media incited moral panic over South Asian grooming gangs preying on white girls. While these cases shed light on the broader problem of sexual exploitation in Britain, they also reveal continuing misconceptions that stereotype South Asian men as ‘natural’ perpetrators of these crimes due to culturally-specific notions of hegemonic masculinity. Examining newspaper coverage from 2012 to 2013, this article discusses the discourse of the British media’s portrayal of South Asian men as perpetrators of sexual violence against white victims, inadvertently construing ‘South Asian men’ as ‘folk devils’. Aisha K Gill (University of Roehampton) and Karen Harrison (University of Hull)

There is a small minority of Pakistani men who believe that white girls are fair game. And we have to be prepared to say that. You can only start solving a problem if you acknowledge it first. This small minority who see women as second class citizens, and white women probably as third class citizens, are to be spoken out against. (…) These were grown men, some of them religious teachers or running businesses, with young families of their own. Whether or not these girls were easy prey, they knew it was wrong. (…) In mosque after mosque, this should be raised as an issue so that anybody remotely involved should start to feel that the community is turning on them. Communities have a responsibility to stand up and say, ‘This is wrong, this will not be tolerated’. (…) Cultural sensitivity should never be a bar to applying the law. (…) Failure to be “open and front-footed” would “create a gap for extremists to fill, a gap where hate can be peddled. (…) Leadership is about moving people with you, not just pissing them off. Baroness Warsi

The terrible story of the Oxford child sex ring has brought shame not only on the city of dreaming spires, but also on the local Muslim community. It is a sense of repulsion and outrage that I feel particularly strongly, working as a Muslim leader and Imam in this neighbourhood and trying to promote genuine cultural integration. (…) But apart from its sheer depravity, what also depresses me about this case is the widespread refusal to face up to its hard realities. The fact is that the vicious activities of the Oxford ring are bound up with religion and race: religion, because all the perpetrators, though they had different nationalities, were Muslim; and race, because they deliberately targeted vulnerable white girls, whom they appeared to regard as ‘easy meat’, to use one of their revealing, racist phrases. Indeed, one of the victims who bravely gave evidence in court told a newspaper afterwards that ‘the men exclusively wanted white girls to abuse’. But as so often in fearful, politically correct modern Britain, there is a craven unwillingness to face up to this reality. Commentators and politicians tip-toe around it, hiding behind weasel words. We are told that child sex abuse happens ‘in all communities’, that white men are really far more likely to be abusers, as has been shown by the fall-out from the Jimmy Savile case. One particularly misguided commentary argued that the predators’ religion was an irrelevance, for what really mattered was that most of them worked in the night-time economy as taxi drivers, just as in the Rochdale child sex scandal many of the abusers worked in kebab houses, so they had far more opportunities to target vulnerable girls. But all this is deluded nonsense. While it is, of course, true that abuse happens in all communities, no amount of obfuscation can hide the pattern that has been exposed in a series of recent chilling scandals, from Rochdale to Oxford, and Telford to Derby. In all these incidents, the abusers were Muslim men, and their targets were under-age white girls. Moreover, reputable studies show that around 26 per cent of those involved in grooming and exploitation rings are Muslims, which is around five times higher than the proportion of Muslims in the adult male population. To pretend that this is not an issue for the Islamic community is to fall into a state of ideological denial. But then part of the reason this scandal happened at all is precisely because of such politically correct thinking. All the agencies of the state, including the police, the social services and the care system, seemed eager to ignore the sickening exploitation that was happening before their eyes. Terrified of accusations of racism, desperate not to undermine the official creed of cultural diversity, they took no action against obvious abuse. (…) Amazingly, the predators seem to have been allowed by local authority managers to come and go from care homes, picking their targets to ply them with drink and drugs before abusing them. You can be sure that if the situation had been reversed, with gangs of tough, young white men preying on vulnerable Muslim girls, the state’s agencies would have acted with greater alacrity. Another sign of the cowardly approach to these horrors is the constant reference to the criminals as ‘Asians’ rather than as ‘Muslims’. In this context, Asian is a completely meaningless term. The men were not from China, or India or Sri Lanka or even Bangladesh. They were all from either Pakistan or Eritrea, which is, in fact, in East Africa rather than Asia. What united them in their outlook was their twisted, corrupt mindset, which bred their misogyny and racism. (…) In the misguided orthodoxy that now prevails in many mosques, including several of those in Oxford, men are unfortunately taught that women are second-class citizens, little more than chattels or possessions over whom they have absolute authority. That is why we see this growing, reprehensible fashion for segregation at Islamic events on university campuses, with female Muslim students pushed to the back of lecture halls. There was a telling incident in the trial when it was revealed that one of the thugs heated up some metal to brand a girl, as if she were a cow. ‘Now, if you have sex with someone else, he’ll know that you belong to me,’ said this criminal, highlighting an attitude where women are seen as nothing more than personal property. The view of some Islamic preachers towards white women can be appalling. They encourage their followers to believe that these women are habitually promiscuous, decadent and sleazy — sins which are made all the worse by the fact that they are kaffurs or non-believers. Their dress code, from mini-skirts to sleeveless tops, is deemed to reflect their impure and immoral outlook. According to this mentality, these white women deserve to be punished for their behaviour by being exploited and degraded. On one level, most imams in the UK are simply using their puritanical sermons to promote the wearing of the hijab and even the burka among their female adherents. But the dire result can be the brutish misogyny we see in the Oxford sex ring. (…) It is telling, though, that they never dared to target Muslim girls from the Oxford area. They knew that they would be sought out by the girls’ families and ostracised by their community. But preying on vulnerable white girls had no such consequences — once again revealing how intimately race and religion are bound up with this case. (…) Horror over this latest scandal should serve as a catalyst for a new approach, but change can take place only if we abandon the dangerous blinkers of political correctness and antiquated multiculturalism.Dr. Taj Hargey (Imam of the Oxford Islamic Congregation)

The terrible story of the Oxford child sex ring has brought shame not only on the city of dreaming spires, but also on the local Muslim community.

It is a sense of repulsion and outrage that I feel particularly strongly, working as a Muslim leader and Imam in this neighbourhood and trying to promote genuine cultural integration.

There is no doubt that the evil deeds of these men have badly set back the cause of cross-community harmony.

In its harrowing details, this grim saga of exploitation, misogyny, perversion and cruelty fills me not only with desperate sorrow for those girls and their families, but also with dread and despair.

Seven members of a paedophile ring were found guilty at the Old Bailey of a catalogue of child sex abuse charges: The case has brought shame not only on the city of dreaming spires, but also on the local Muslim community

If I were the judge in this case, I would hand out the harshest possible jail sentences to these monstrous predators, both to see that justice is done for their victims and to send out a message to other exploiters.

And when I say harsh, I mean it: none of this fashionable nonsense about prisoners being released only a quarter of the way through their sentences. There is no pattern of good conduct these men could follow behind bars that could possibly make up for all the terrible suffering they have inflicted on others.

Depravity

But apart from its sheer depravity, what also depresses me about this case is the widespread refusal to face up to its hard realities.

The fact is that the vicious activities of the Oxford ring are bound up with religion and race: religion, because all the perpetrators, though they had different nationalities, were Muslim; and race, because they deliberately targeted vulnerable white girls, whom they appeared to regard as ‘easy meat’, to use one of their revealing, racist phrases.

Indeed, one of the victims who bravely gave evidence in court told a newspaper afterwards that ‘the men exclusively wanted white girls to abuse’.

Brothers Bassam Karrar (left) and Mohammed Karrar (right) were found guilty at the Old Bailey yesterday. It can not be ignored that all all the perpetrators, though they had different nationalities, were Muslim

But as so often in fearful, politically correct modern Britain, there is a craven unwillingness to face up to this reality.

We are told that child sex abuse happens ‘in all communities’, that white men are really far more likely to be abusers, as has been shown by the fall-out from the Jimmy Savile case.

One particularly misguided commentary argued that the predators’ religion was an irrelevance, for what really mattered was that most of them worked in the night-time economy as taxi drivers, just as in the Rochdale child sex scandal many of the abusers worked in kebab houses, so they had far more opportunities to target vulnerable girls.

‘As so often in fearful, politically correct modern Britain, there is a craven unwillingness to face up to the reality that their actions are tied up with religion and race’

But all this is deluded nonsense. While it is, of course, true that abuse happens in all communities, no amount of obfuscation can hide the pattern that has been exposed in a series of recent chilling scandals, from Rochdale to Oxford, and Telford to Derby.

In all these incidents, the abusers were Muslim men, and their targets were under-age white girls.

Moreover, reputable studies show that around 26 per cent of those involved in grooming and exploitation rings are Muslims, which is around five times higher than the proportion of Muslims in the adult male population.

To pretend that this is not an issue for the Islamic community is to fall into a state of ideological denial.

But then part of the reason this scandal happened at all is precisely because of such politically correct thinking. All the agencies of the state, including the police, the social services and the care system, seemed eager to ignore the sickening exploitation that was happening before their eyes.

Terrified of accusations of racism, desperate not to undermine the official creed of cultural diversity, they took no action against obvious abuse.

Brothers Anjum Dogar (left) and Akhtar Dogar (right) have been convicted of offences involving underage girls. one of the victims who bravely gave evidence in court told a newspaper afterwards that ‘the men exclusively wanted white girls to abuse’

Amazingly, the predators seem to have been allowed by local authority managers to come and go from care homes, picking their targets to ply them with drink and drugs before abusing them. You can be sure that if the situation had been reversed, with gangs of tough, young white men preying on vulnerable Muslim girls, the state’s agencies would have acted with greater alacrity.

Another sign of the cowardly approach to these horrors is the constant reference to the criminals as ‘Asians’ rather than as ‘Muslims’.

In this context, Asian is a completely meaningless term. The men were not from China, or India or Sri Lanka or even Bangladesh. They were all from either Pakistan or Eritrea, which is, in fact, in East Africa rather than Asia.

Zeeshan Ahmed (left) and Kamar Jamil (right) were among those who were convicted at the Old Bailey. Some aspects of the trial highlighted an attitude where women are seen as nothing more than personal property

What united them in their outlook was their twisted, corrupt mindset, which bred their misogyny and racism.

If they had been real, genuine followers of Islam, they would not have dreamt of indulging in such vile crimes, for true Islam preaches respect for women and warns against all forms of sexual licence, including adultery and exploitation.

Contempt

Assad Hussain was convicted of having sex with a child. Reputable studies show that around 26 per cent of those involved in grooming and exploitation rings are Muslims

By all accounts, this was not the version that these men heard in their mosques. On the contrary, they would have been drip-fed for years a far less uplifting doctrine, one that denigrates all women, but treats whites with particular contempt.

In the misguided orthodoxy that now prevails in many mosques, including several of those in Oxford, men are unfortunately taught that women are second-class citizens, little more than chattels or possessions over whom they have absolute authority.

That is why we see this growing, reprehensible fashion for segregation at Islamic events on university campuses, with female Muslim students pushed to the back of lecture halls.

There was a telling incident in the trial when it was revealed that one of the thugs heated up some metal to brand a girl, as if she were a cow. ‘Now, if you have sex with someone else, he’ll know that you belong to me,’ said this criminal, highlighting an attitude where women are seen as nothing more than personal property.

The view of some Islamic preachers towards white women can be appalling. They encourage their followers to believe that these women are habitually promiscuous, decadent and sleazy — sins which are made all the worse by the fact that they are kaffurs or non-believers.

Their dress code, from mini-skirts to sleeveless tops, is deemed to reflect their impure and immoral outlook. According to this mentality, these white women deserve to be punished for their behaviour by being exploited and degraded.

Brutish

On one level, most imams in the UK are simply using their puritanical sermons to promote the wearing of the hijab and even the burka among their female adherents. But the dire result can be the brutish misogyny we see in the Oxford sex ring.

For those of us who support effective and meaningful integration, it is dispiriting to see how little these criminals, several of them second-generation Britons, have been integrated into our society.

If they were possessed by the slightest sense of belonging or shared citizenship, they would have had some respect for the welfare of these girls.

Instead, they saw only people from an alien world with which they felt no connection. For them, there was no sense of kinship or solidarity for people in their neighbourhood who were not Muslims.

It is telling, though, that they never dared to target Muslim girls from the Oxford area. They knew that they would be sought out by the girls’ families and ostracised by their community. But preying on vulnerable white girls had no such consequences — once again revealing how intimately race and religion are bound up with this case.

We will build a secure society only when we are all taught to have respect for one another, regardless of creed or colour.

Horror over this latest scandal should serve as a catalyst for a new approach, but change can take place only if we abandon the dangerous blinkers of political correctness and antiquated multiculturalism.

Baroness Warsi may be a Cabinet minister with all the finely-honed minds of the civil service to call upon, but sometimes the adviser she trusts most is simply her dad.

So it was when the horrific details of the Rochdale sexual grooming scandal poured out in a shocking court case this month.

Five white girls, aged 13 to 15, were plied with alcohol, food and money and subjected to multiple sex attacks. The guilty men were Muslims of mainly Pakistani origin, some regarded as pillars of their community.

Shortly after nine men were convicted, Lady Warsi sat down to dinner at her parents’ house and her father asked what the Government was going to do about it. She did not know. The baroness recalled: “Dad then said, ‘Well, what are you doing about it?’ I said, ‘Oh, it’s not me, it’s a Home Office issue’.” At this her father, Safdar, gave her a remarkable lecture.

“He said to me: ‘Sayeeda, what is the point in being in a position of leadership if you don’t lead on issues that are so fundamental? This is so stomach churningly sick that you should have been out there condemning it as loudly as you could. Uniquely, you are in a position to show leadership on this.’

“I thought to myself, he’s absolutely right.” Today she has decided to use an interview with the Evening Standard to do as her father advised.

Until now, Lady Warsi — Britain’s most senior Muslim politician and the first Muslim woman to reach the Cabinet — has declined media requests for comment on the case. But in fact, the 41-year-old former solicitor has strong views of what went so badly wrong in a community just like the one in which she was raised.

“There is a small minority of Pakistani men who believe that white girls are fair game,” she said — choosing her words with care but not mincing them. “And we have to be prepared to say that. You can only start solving a problem if you acknowledge it first.”

She is clear that the colour of the victims’ skin, as well as their vulnerability, helped to make them a target. “This small minority who see women as second class citizens, and white women probably as third class citizens, are to be spoken out against,” she said.

This puts her at odds with some commentators who argue that the racial element was coincidental and that sex abuse occurs in white gangs. She says the Rochdale case was “even more disgusting” than cases of girls being passed around street gangs. “These were grown men, some of them religious teachers or running businesses, with young families of their own,” she said. Whether or not these girls were easy prey, they knew it was wrong.”

Her second challenge is to British Muslim leaders and preachers who have been equally appalled but nervous of speaking out.

“In mosque after mosque, this should be raised as an issue so that anybody remotely involved should start to feel that the community is turning on them,” she said. “Communities have a responsibility to stand up and say, ‘This is wrong, this will not be tolerated’.”

So far, she added, the response from organisations like the British Muslim Forum and the Muslim Council of Britain has been “fantastic”.

Her third plea is for the authorities to stop being squeamish about investigating allegations involving minorities. “Cultural sensitivity should never be a bar to applying the law,” she said.

Failure to be “open and front-footed” would “create a gap for extremists to fill, a gap where hate can be peddled”. The leader of the racist BNP, Nick Griffin, has already gloated about “Muslim paedophile rapists”.

Nobody could accuse Lady Warsi of what she calls “pussyfooting” around political minefields. In her five years as a top-level Tory she has hit out at voting fraud, attacked “militant secularisation”, been pelted by eggs and gone eyeball to eyeball against Mr Griffin.

But she says her aim is to resolve this issue, not pick a fight. “Leadership is about moving people with you, not just pissing them off,” she said.

Her passion is catching. She talks non-stop in a broad Yorkshire accent, acquired in her childhood in Dewsbury where she went to a state school.

Fluent in English, Urdu and Punjabi, she is a comfortable mix of cultures. Her mum, Hafeeza, arranged her first marriage, which lasted 17 years. In 2009 she married ”my rock”, Iftikhar Azam, in a ceremony at her parents’ house in Dewsbury. Although a practicing Muslim, who eschews alcohol and fasts at Ramadan, she hints at bending some rules. “Strictly, I should be doing my prayers five times a day. But I hate answering that: If I answer it truthfully my mum won’t be best pleased. If I said I was perfect, I would be lying.”

THE key to her confidence and success was a father whom she describes as “an amazing feminist” as well as a remarkable success story. Safdar Hussain came to Britain from a rural village in the Punjab with £2.50 to his name and worked double-shifts in a rag mill to make ends meet.

He became a bus conductor, bus driver, taxi driver and driving instructor before co-founding a firm manufacturing hand-made beds that now turns over £5 million a year.

Safdar encouraged his wife to have driving lessons in the Seventies, put his five daughters through university and into professional careers — and told them all to embrace the best of their Pakistani heritage as well as British culture.

When travelling abroad, she urges Muslim parents to give their girls the same chances, arguing that the Koran clearly exhorts followers to acquire knowledge. “Nowhere does it say, ‘Only if you are a bloke’.”

It’s hard to imagine any bloke telling Lady Warsi what to do. Except, of course, her dad.

Child sexual exploitation is one of the most sickening crimes of our age, yet the scale is unknown because, by its very nature, boys and girls frequently go missing in an underworld of systematic abuse. Barnardo’s has 22 projects across the country dedicated to finding and helping these young people, and has been campaigning for years to bring the issue to the forefront of the government’s agenda.

The past weeks have seen a welcome shift in recognition of this problem, but the focus has been on the ethnicity of abusers, based on two high-profile cases in particular parts of England. It’s crucial to recognise that just as the ethnicity of the perpetrators differs across the UK, so does that of the children. We need to pull away from the growing stereotypes: it is not just Asian men who commit this crime, nor are the victims only white – black and Asian girls are targeted too.

They are used like puppets by these abhorrent men and women – groomed and manipulated to a point where they are brainwashed, raped and scarred for life. I have met some very brave girls and boys who we are helping to overcome the tragic childhood that they will never get back.

One of them is Aaliyah. Her story isn’t unusual. As 14 she began to become estranged from her parents and started to go out a lot. She was introduced to men older than her, who would impress her with their flash cars and gifts. Desperate for love and attention the affection they showed her seemed very real, until it turned nasty. The unthinkable cruelty she suffered will never be forgotten – Aaliyah was physically and mentally abused, with one so-called boyfriend pulling her out of his car by her hair and threatening to cut her legs off with an axe before driving her to a hotel room, « to have his friends come over and do what they wanted to me ».

We worked with more than a thousand children and young people like Aaliyah last year, and we believe that is likely to be the tip of the iceberg. Wherever we have looked for exploitation, we have found it. We need to use the momentum of current debate to highlight what really matters: protecting these vulnerable children.

It is 16 years since Barnardo’s opened its first service dedicated to sexually exploited children in Bradford. Today we release a report, Puppet on a String, that highlights three new issues: trafficking around the UK is becoming more common; sexual exploitation is more organised and grooming more sophisticated, with technology being used to find, isolate and control victims; and increasingly younger children are being abused.

Emma’s sexual exploitation began in a similar way to Aaliyah’s. When, aged 14, she met a man in his early 30s who showered her with gifts and attention, she fell in love, but soon her « boyfriend » began abusing her and forcing her to sleep with different men. Her words are heartbreaking: « I just hoped that one day one of the men would be a real boyfriend, that he’d like me for the real me and that he’d want to save me. But it never happened. »

If we are to truly learn from the lessons of the cases in Derby and Rochdale, the government must recognise this as a child protection issue and appoint a dedicated children’s minister to formulate a national action plan to fully address the scale and horror of child sexual exploitation in the UK.

This issue must not be a flash in the pan – we need to use the leverage that the current media debate has given us to ensure that this hidden issue is now very much out in the open and tackled at all levels.

Our « Cut them free » campaign hopes to turn around the lives of these young victims. We want better training for professionals who work with children in order to improve early identification of child sexual exploitation, including police, schools and social services. Statutory responses and the provision of services for exploited children must also be improved. We need greater clarity about the numbers of children abused in this way, so methods of gathering evidence and data kept on the numbers of children being sexually exploited should be strengthened. And we absolutely must see improvements in prosecution procedures in order to increase the number of cases that lead to a conviction.

We need to send a loud and clear message to perpetrators – we will find them and they will be punished for the intolerable abuse they have inflicted upon so many young lives.

Darren Osborne rented a van and drove from Cardiff to London intending to kill Muslims. Photograph: Frank Augstein/AP
In a country that prides itself on tolerance, and in a city that celebrates its diversity, Makram Ali’s final journey to honour his god ended with him being murdered for his religion.

He lived in Finsbury Park, north London, about 400 yards from the mosque he had attended for the past 25 years, located in Muslim Welfare House.

On a warm June evening last year, Ali walked, through pain and with the aid of a stick, to join late-night prayers. It was Ramadan, an especially holy time for Muslims.

Ali’s faith guided a life that saw him raise four daughters and two sons, and feel pride in seeing two of the eldest children reach university. Those who knew him knew a man who demonstrated the values of a model British citizen, despite hardships with health and money that would lead others to make excuses and embrace the worst values. Ali, 51, was about to come across one such person.

In the weeks before that day, Darren Osborne had found a warped belief system, styling himself as an extremist rightwing “soldier”. On 18 June 2017, he left his home in Cardiff in a rented van and drove to London, looking for Muslims to kill.

He scoured the centre of London for an Islamic pro-Palestinian march, and then moved on to the south in search of a mosque. By 11.30pm, he found a target in the north of the city. Having reached the Finsbury Park area, Osborne asked for directions to the mosque, and left his van to walk there, police believe, to carry out reconnaissance ahead of his attack.

Just after midnight, prayers ended. As worshippers headed home, Ali fell to the floor, unwell, on a cul-de-sac off Seven Sisters Road. He was breathing, speaking barely audibly, but still alive.

Makram Ali had six children and was said to be a model British citizen. Photograph: Metropolitan police/PA
Other Muslims rushed to Ali’s aid, offering him water and help. For Osborne, the crowd, some of them wearing Islamic clothing, was the target he sought for his hatred.

He was driving a rented white Citroën, which veered left across Seven Sisters Road, across a bus lane, and then across the pavement.

Osborne was driving at 16mph (26km/h) as his van slammed into the crowd. It was the fourth terrorist attack in Britain in three months, but this time, the ideology behind it was not Islamist.

Ibrahim Benaounda described the impact as like “being on a rollercoaster, spinning round and round. I felt everything. I felt my bones breaking”.

Mohammed Geedi was also knocked to the ground. When he got up, he said he saw people “splattered all over the place”.

Adnan Mohamud had called 999 for help for the stricken Ali. He was still on the phone when the van hit.

Mohamud shouted: “Someone’s just come and run over a whole lot of people … People are dying, man.”

One witness described a limb being stuck under the van’s wheel. Waleed Salim said he and others tried to lift the van to get his cousin, Hamdi Alfaiq, out from underneath it. Alfaiq, who suffered extensive injuries and needed months of rehabilitation, was one of 12 people wounded.

The front van’s offside wheel ran over Ali on the upper right side of his chest, leaving a tyre track across his torso. Within an hour, he died, struck down 100 yards from where he lived.

Watching were some of his family, who had been alerted that Ali had fallen ill. Toufik Kacimi of Muslim Welfare House said: “His daughter saw the van hit her dad.”

Osborne fled the van. Despite his claims to the contrary at the trial, where he said he had been changing his trousers in the footwell while someone else drove, CCTV footage showed he was alone. He tried to escape, shouting “I want to kill more Muslims”. The Muslim people Osborne had tried to murder captured him, then saved him.

Mohammed Mahmoud, the mosque’s imam, shielded Osborne from the crowd. He told Woolwich crown court: “I shouted ‘No one touch him’ [and] told people to get back, and said: ‘We are handing him in unscathed to the police’.

“He should answer for his crime in a court, and not in a court in the street.”

In the van, Osborne had left a note, which he had written 24 hours before in a Cardiff pub, from which he was ejected after making racist and anti-Muslim remarks.

The note gave voice to what was inside him, and showed the attack was premeditated.

It referenced the Rotherham sexual abuse scandal, which involved gruesome attacks by men from a mainly Pakistani, and therefore Muslim, background. It had led to claims that surfaced in mainstream media debate that there was something in the men’s heritage that made them target white girls.

The note railed against the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and the London mayor, Sadiq Khan. It mentioned the Islamist terrorist attacks on London and Manchester between March and June 2017. It echoed the talking points of extremist propaganda.

Osborne launched into further diatribes while in police custody. But in contrast to some other committed violent extremists, he started to ramble about losing control of the van, rather than claiming the attack as a deliberate act of which he was proud.

Despite his violence, Osborne had not been a hardcore, long-term ideologue. Unlike Thomas Mair, who murdered the MP Jo Cox in 2016, he did not have a longstanding interest in extremist rightwing propaganda.

Some of his behaviour in court was jarringly mundane. In the dock as the prosecution started its case against him, Osborne turned to one of his guards. She was young, female and black. Osborne smiled and winked at her. She smiled back, then turned her head out of his view and let the disgust show on her face.

Sarah Andrews, his estranged partner, told detectives that Osborne was radicalised into a terrorist murderer in three weeks. Friends and family say there were no previous signs of racism or extremism.

The catalyst, police believe, came three weeks before the attack, when his attitudes began to metastasise after he watched Three Girls, a BBC TV drama about the Rochdale grooming scandal. He also read extremist rightwing propaganda online that left him “brainwashed” and a “ticking timebomb”.
Paul Gill, a terrorism expert and senior lecturer at at University College London, said radicalisation can be rapid, making it almost impossible to detect.

“It is rare, but violent extremism can occur quickly,” he said. “Brusthom Ziamani was a Jehovah’s Witness three months prior to his arrest for an Isis-inspired plot. It is usually expedited by primitive attack plans and a history of criminal activity and violence.”

Andrews, for her part, said she believed Osborne had become angry “about seeing young girls exploited” and developed his fixation with Muslims from that point.

“In recent weeks, he has become obsessed with Muslims, accusing them all of being rapists and being part of paedophile gangs,” she said.

Osborne gorged on social media postings by the former EDL leader Tommy Robinson, as well as members of the far-right group Britain First.

Like much of the modern British far right, it rails against multiculturalism and Muslims.

Osborne had not worked for a decade and had mental health issues, as well as problems with alcohol and drug abuse. He had convictions for violence, once serving a two-year jail term, and had an unpredictable temper.

Haydon confirmed that none of the material Osborne viewed from the extreme right crossed the line into being either criminal or breaking terrorism laws. “We are concerned about the role the internet played in this case,” he said.

Some see the pathway to Osborne’s extreme rightwing views being smoothed by some mainstream media opinion allegedly demonising all Muslims for the atrocities and violent extremist views of a small minority.

Harun Khan, the secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said: “Osborne was motivated by anti-Muslim groups and Islamophobic tropes not only prevalent in far-right circles, but also made acceptable in our mainstream. The case tells us that we must all exercise caution when tempted to stigmatise any group of people.”

Security officials fear Osborne may be more than a one-off. They are concerned about extremist rightwing attacks being incited in the same way as Islamist violence: insidious propaganda cast out wide online, only needing some people to be infected by it to believe they should carry out violence. The consequent effects on society would be, to put it mildly, destabilising.

One senior counter-terrorism source told the Guardian that extremist rightwing activity was on the increase and a growing threat to national security. But there were also concerns that violence from Islamists and white terrorists would become symbiotic, citing the fear of each other to bolster support for their calls to terrorism.

The government has banned three far-right groups, and counter-terrorism sources say operations targeting the extreme right are increasing. Haydon said 30% of referrals to Prevent concern domestic extremism.

Osborne’s rage came as his life had stalled, and the hatred from extremist propaganda spoke to, then exacerbated, his existing demons. It was a tragedy for Ali’s family that Osborne found his voice only in such dangerous and destructive language.

The different ways the media covered two cases of men grooming children for sex show how shockingly easy it is to demonise a whole community

Joseph Harker

The Guardian

22 Jul 2012

By now surely everyone knows the case of the eight men convicted of picking vulnerable underage girls off the streets, then plying them with drink and drugs before having sex with them. A shocking story. But maybe you haven’t heard. Because these sex assaults did not take place in Rochdale, where a similar story led the news for days in May, but in Derby earlier this month. Fifteen girls aged 13 to 15, many of them in care, were preyed on by the men. And though they were not working as a gang, their methods were similar – often targeting children in care and luring them with, among other things, cuddly toys. But this time, of the eight predators, seven were white, not Asian. And the story made barely a ripple in the national media.

Of the daily papers, only the Guardian and the Times reported it. There was no commentary anywhere on how these crimes shine a light on British culture, or how middle-aged white men have to confront the deep flaws in their religious and ethnic identity. Yet that’s exactly what played out following the conviction in May of the « Asian sex gang » in Rochdale, which made the front page of every national newspaper. Though analysis of the case focused on how big a factor was race, religion and culture, the unreported story is of how politicians and the media have created a new racial scapegoat. In fact, if anyone wants to study how racism begins, and creeps into the consciousness of an entire nation, they need look no further.

Imagine you were living in a town of 20,000 people – the size of, say, Penzance in Cornwall – and one day it was discovered that one of its residents had been involved in a sex crime. Would it be reasonable to say that the whole town had a cultural problem, that it needed to address the scourge – that anyone not doing so was part of a « conspiracy of silence »? But the intense interest in the Rochdale story arose from a January 2011 Times « scoop » that was based on the conviction of at most 50 British Pakistanis out of a total UK population of 1.2 million, just one in 24,000: one person per Penzance.

Make no mistake, the Rochdale crimes were vile, and those convicted deserve every year of their sentences. But where, amid all the commentary, was the evidence that this is a racial issue; that there’s something inherently perverted about Muslim or Asian culture?

Even the Child Protection and Online Protection Centre (Ceop), which has also studied potential offenders who have not been convicted, has only identified 41 Asian gangs (of 230 in total) and 240 Asian individuals – and they are spread across the country. But, despite this, a new stereotype has taken hold: that a significant proportion of Asian men are groomers (and the rest of their communities know of it and keep silent).

But if it really is an « Asian » thing, how come Indians don’t do it? If it’s a « Pakistani » thing, how come an Afghan was convicted in the Rochdale case? And if it’s a « Muslim » thing, how come it doesn’t seem to involve anyone of African or Middle Eastern origin? The standard response to anyone who questions this is: face the facts, all those convicted in Rochdale were Muslim. Well, if one case is enough to make such a generalisation, how about if all the members of a gang of armed robbers were white; or cybercriminals; or child traffickers? (All three of these have happened.) Would we be so keen to « face the facts » and make it a problem the whole white community has to deal with? Would we have articles examining what it is about Britishness or Christianity or Europeanness, that makes people so capable of such things?

Whatever the case, we know that abuse of white girls is not a cultural or religious issue because there is no longstanding history of it taking place in Asia or the Muslim world.

How did middle-aged Asian men from tight-knit communities even come into contact with white teenage girls in Rochdale? The main cultural relevance in this story is that vulnerable, often disturbed, young girls, regularly out late at night, often end up in late-closing restaurants and minicab offices, staffed almost exclusively by men. After a while, relationships build up, with the men offering free lifts and/or food. For those with a predatory instinct, sexual exploitation is an easy next step. This is an issue of what men can do when away from their own families and in a position of power over badly damaged young people.

It’s a story repeated across Britain, by white and other ethnic groups: where the opportunity arises, some men will take advantage. The precise method, and whether it’s an individual or group crime, depends on the particular setting – be they priests, youth workers or networks on the web.

Despite all we know about racism, genocide and ethnic cleansing, the Rochdale case showed how shockingly easy it is to demonise a community. Before long, the wider public will believe the problem is endemic within that race/religion, and that anyone within that group who rebuts the claims is denying this basic truth. Normally, one would expect a counter-argument to force its way into the discussion. But in this case the crimes were so horrific that right-thinking people were naturally wary of being seen to condone them. In fact, the reason I am writing this is that I am neither Asian nor Muslim nor Pakistani, so I cannot be accused of being in denial or trying to hide a painful truth. But I am black, and I know how racism works; and, more than that, I have a background in maths and science, so I know you can’t extrapolate a tiny, flawed set of data and use it to make a sweeping generalisation.

I am also certain that, if the tables were turned and the victims were Asian or Muslim, we would have been subjected to equally skewed « expert » commentary asking: what is wrong with how Muslims raise girls? Why are so many of them on the streets at night? Shouldn’t the community face up to its shocking moral breakdown?

We have been here before, of course: in the 1950s, West Indian men were labelled pimps, luring innocent young white girls into prostitution. By the 1970s and 80s they were vilified as muggers and looters. And two years ago, Channel 4 ran stories, again based on a tiny set of data, claiming there was an endemic culture of gang rape in black communities. The victims weren’t white, though, so media interest soon faded. It seems that these stories need to strike terror in the heart of white people for them to really take off.

What is also at play here is the inability of people, when learning about a different culture or race, to distinguish between the aberrations of a tiny minority within that group, and the normal behaviour of a significant section. Some examples are small in number but can be the tip of a much wider problem: eg, knife crime, which is literally the sharp end of a host of problems affecting black communities ranging from family breakdown, to poverty, to low school achievement and social exclusion.

But in Asia, Pakistan or Islam there is no culture of grooming or sex abuse – any more than there is anywhere else in the world – so the tiny number of cases have no cultural significance. Which means those who believe it, or perpetuate it, are succumbing to racism, much as they may protest. Exactly the same mistake was made after 9/11, when the actions of a tiny number of fanatics were used to cast aspersions against a 1.5 billion-strong community worldwide. Motives were questioned: are you with us or the terrorists? How fundamental are your beliefs? Can we trust you?

Imagine if, after Anders Breivik’s carnage in Norway last year, which he claimed to be in defence of the Christian world, British people were repeatedly asked whether they supported him? Lumped together in the same white religious group as the killer and constantly told they must renounce him, or explain why we should believe that their type of Christianity – even if they were non-believers – is different from his. « It’s nothing to do with me », most people would say. But somehow that answer was never good enough when given by Muslims over al-Qaida. And this hectoring was self-defeating because it caused only greater alienaton and resentment towards the west and, in particular, its foreign policies.

Ultimately, the urge to vilify groups of whom we know little may be very human, and helps us bond with those we feel are « like us ». But if we are going to deal with the world as it is, and not as a cosy fantasyland where our group is racially and culturally supreme, we have to recognise when sweeping statements are false.

And if we truly care about the sexual exploitation of girls, we need to know that we must look at all communities, across the whole country, and not just at those that play to a smug sense of superiority about ourselves.

So-called “Type 1 offenders” target young people “on the basis of their vulnerability, rather than as a result of a specific preferential sexual interest in children”.

Ceop received intelligence from 31 out of 43 police forces on groups like this who were known or suspected to have abused vulnerable children in 2012.

There were 57 such groups, ranging from two to 25 suspects, on the radar of those 31 constabularies. We don’t know if any have now been convicted.

So-called “Type 2” groups – where the offenders have a long-standing sexual interest in children, were much less common. Only seven known or suspected paedophile rings were reported to Ceop.

It is possible to track cases that have been through the courts via media reports, although this is pretty unscientific.

In 2011 the Times journalist Andrew Norfolk identified 17 cases that had led to convictions where there had been a similar pattern of grooming.

In all cases, the victims were vulnerable teenage girls, often in the care of social services. They were approached on the street by men, befriended and plied with alcohol or drugs, before being sexually abused.

Updating the list to include more recent convictions that fit the same pattern, we find that there have been at least 27 similar cases in the last decade.

This is based on a trawl of news sources so is almost certainly incomplete.

Race and religion

The Jay report into failings in Rotherham says: “By far the majority of perpetrators were described as Asian by victims, yet throughout the entire period, councillors did not engage directly with the Pakistani-heritage community to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue.

“Some councillors seemed to think it was a one-off problem, which they hoped would go away. Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.”

Ceop data about the ethnicity of offenders and suspects identified by those 31 police forces in 2012 is incomplete.

The unit says: “All ethnicities were represented in the sample. However, a disproportionate number of offenders were reported as Asian.”

Of 52 groups where ethnicity data was provided, 26 (50 per cent) comprised all Asian offenders, 11 (21 per cent) were all white, 9 (17 per cent) groups had offenders from multiple ethnicities, 4 (8 per cent) were all black offenders and there were 2 (4 per cent) exclusively Arab groups.

Of the 306 offenders whose ethnicity was noted, 75 per cent were categorised as Asian, 17 per cent white, and the remaining 8 per cent black (5 per cent) or Arab (3 per cent).

Ceop identified 144 victims of the Type 1 groups. Again, the data was incomplete. Gender was mentioned in 118 cases. All were female. Some 97 per cent of victims were white.

Girls aged between 14 and 15 accounted for 57 per cent of victims. Out of 144 girls, 100 had “at least one identifiable vulnerability” like alcohol or drug problems, mental health issues or a history of going missing. More than half of the victims were in local authority care.

The 27 court cases that we found led to the convictions of 92 men. Some 79 (87 per cent) were reported as being of South Asian Muslim origin.

Three were white Britons, two were Indian, three were Iraqi Kurds, four were eastern European Roma and one was a Congolese refugee, according to reports of the trials.

Considerable caution is needed when looking at these numbers, as our sample is very unscientific. There are grooming cases we will have missed, and there will undoubtedly be offences that have not resulted in convictions.

Why are so many victims white?

We’re into the realm of opinion now.

Sentencing nine men in 2012 over offences in Rochdale, judge Gerald Clifton told the defendants they had treated their victims “as though they were worthless and beyond all respect”, adding: “I believe that one of the factors that led to that was that they were not of your community or religion.”

But at the Derby trial in 2010 the judge said he thought the race of the victims and their abusers was “coincidental”.

One of the victims of the Oxford gang told the Guardian that her abusers had asked her to recruit other teenagers and “specified that they wanted only white girls”.

Ceop says: “The comparative levels of freedom that white British children enjoy in comparison to some other ethnicities may make them more vulnerable to exploitation.

“They may also be more likely to report abuse. This is an area requiring better data and further research.”

How many children are at risk?

A report by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner found that 2,409 children were confirmed as victims of sexual exploitation in gangs and groups in the 14 months between August 2010 to October 2011.

If that sounds low compared to the 1,400 identified in Rotherham alone, remember that this number covers 16 years.

This probably only scratches the surface of the real number of victims, and the children’s commissioner said that at least 16,500 children had been identified as being “at risk of sexual exploitation” during one year.

At Sheffield Crown Court throughout September and October, eight men sat in the dock accused of rape and other sexual crimes against four girls, three aged 13 and one 16. The case resulted in five being convicted and three acquitted. All of the eight defendants were Pakistani Muslims and the girls white British. Does this matter? Not for the reasons the British National Party would have us believe, but it is nonetheless significant.

Razwan Razaq, 30, his 24-year-old brother Umar, Muhammed Zafran Ramzan, 21, Adil Hussain, 20, and Mohsin Khan, 21, were sent to prison for between four-and-a-half to 11 years.

The crimes were committed in and around Rotherham, a fairly typical south Yorkshire town. Although unemployment is fairly high, Rotherham is now also a popular summer visitors’ destination when All Saints Square is transformed into a seaside beach. Every month, there is a farmers’ market that sells produce from local farmers and traders, and Jamie Oliver’s TV series, Jamie’s Ministry of Food, tried to teach the town’s inhabitants to establish healthy eating as part of daily life.

But many parents are concerned far more with the safety of their children than with organic food. Rotherham, along with many other towns, cities and villages in northern England has become infected with the vile activities of criminal gangs using children as currency. While child sexual abuse occurs in every community and culture, what is happening in Rotherham and elsewhere in Yorkshire and Lancashire is organised pimping of girls by Asian gangs who trade their victims for cash and favours.

« These men all know and trust each other, » says Jane, the mother of one of the victims. « They don’t abuse these girls because they are Muslim, but because they are criminals who think they are above the law. »

Although there is no hard evidence of financial gain in the Rotherham case, child protection professionals tell me that the pattern in such cases is that the girls are traded for cash as well as favours between criminals. A number of the gangs operating in the region have found that the sharp drop in the price of drugs has led them to losing considerable income, and that selling girls is increasingly filling the gap.

Jane’s daughter Sophie (not their real names) was a happy, ordinary 12-year-old until she met a group of adult males who would control every aspect of her life. Before she escaped, a year later, Sophie had been raped by the gang members as a way of « breaking her in » and then passed around various other men for sex.

The methods used by the pimps are sophisticated and sinister. First, the girls are identified in locations, such as parks, schools, leisure facilities and shopping malls after which boys of their age are sent to befriend them. After a friendship is established, the boys introduce their contacts to young men whom they often describe as cousins.

Then the grooming process gets really under way. The young man will take the girl out in his car, give her vodka, cigarette and cannabis, and take her to venues she would not normally experience until older.

Often giving the girl a mobile telephone as a « gift », the pimp is then able to track her every move by calls and texting, which eventually will be used by him to send instructions as to details of arrangements with punters. The men sell the girls on to contacts for around £200 a time or as currency for a business deal. « I was always asked why I kept going back to my pimp, » says Sophie, « but they flatter you and make you think you are really loved. I thought he was my boyfriend until it was too late to get away. » Another tactic of the pimp is getting the girl to despise and mistrust her own parents in order that he can achieve total control over her. The pimps routinely tell their victims that their parents are racist towards Asian people and that they disapprove of the relationships because the men are of Pakistani Muslim heritage, not because they are older. Some of the parents I met were racist, and some had developed almost a phobia against Asian men, fuelled by the misinformation and bigotry trotted out by racist groups in response to the pimping gangs.

The Leeds-based Coalition for the Removal of Pimping (Crop) supports the families of children caught up in sexual exploitation networks. Crop is understandably reticent about commenting on any issues concerning the race or religion of child abusers and pimps. As far as it is concerned, we should not focus on one particular ethnic group because the problem is about men’s abuse of children. Its research earlier this decade found that the vast majority of the children groomed are white and the majority of perpetrators of Asian origin. « Society seeks to condemn female sexual activity, and culturally within the statutory sector and community the victims are seen as asking for it, » says Crop’s Rachel Loise. « The perpetrators are the last to be condemned. Prosecutions are rare, and sentencing is not severe enough. »

Unfortunately, the reluctance of the various anti-child abuse campaigns and charities to engage openly with the fact that, in the north of England, the majority of men involved in child-grooming criminal gangs are Pakistani Muslim means that racist organisations such as the BNP hijack the issue.

« The fact that these particular gangs are made up of Pakistani men is significant but not in the way racists would have us believe, » says one child protection expert who asked not to be named. « While the BNP would have us believe that abusing white girls is an endemic part of these men’s culture — which it absolutely is not — the truth is that these men are aware that the police do not want to be accused of racism in today’s climate. »

In 2004, Channel 4 withdrew Edge of the City, its controversial documentary made by Annie Hall that depicted parents trying to stop groups of young Asian men grooming white girls as young as 11 for sex. It had been seized on by the BNP as a party political broadcast.

Colin Cramphorn, the then Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, joined groups such as Unite against Fascism in calling for the documentary to be withdrawn. Channel 4 complied, saying that the issue was not censorship but timing because of the proximity with the local and European elections. But many argued at the time that the delay in transmission had strengthened the case of the BNP.

After the film was withdrawn, one of the mothers sent Annie Hall a text message: « It’s a real shame when votes come before young girls’ lives. »

For many white girls growing up in fairly traditional communities, the unfamiliarity of boys and men from different ethnic backgrounds can be exciting and attractive.

« The man I thought was my boyfriend used to dress really well and always smelt nice, » says Sophie, « and I thought it were dead nice the way he talked, and even his manners seemed better than boys I were used to. »

Emma Jackson knows exactly how the pimping gangs operate in Rotherham because she was also a victim of one. When Emma was 12, she was befriended by Asian boys around her own age who soon introduced her to relatives in their twenties and thirties.

Emma had no idea she was being groomed and brainwashed until one day, totally out of the blue, she was taken to wasteland and raped by the gang leader. The attack was watched by laughing gang members and recorded on a number of mobile phones.

« People ask me why I kept going back to Tarik, even after he raped me, » says Emma, « but he threatened to firebomb my home and rape my own mother if I tried to escape. »

Emma now gives support, through a charity set up to prevent the sexual abuse of children, to a number of victims of pimping gangs and has found that the girls are being targeted at an even younger age.

« The gangs want virgins and girls who are free of sexual diseases. Most of the men buying sex with the girls have Muslim wives and they don’t want to risk infection. The younger you look, the more saleable you are. »

One youth worker in south Yorkshire told me that because religious Muslims are being pressurised to marry virgins within their own extended family networks, it means that some are more likely to view white girls as easily available and « safer » than Pakistani girls.

When I first wrote about the issue of Asian grooming gangs in 2007, my name was included on the website Islamophobia Watch: Documenting anti-Muslim Bigotry. So was that of Ann Cryer, the former Labour MP for Keighley in Yorkshire, who had been at the forefront of attempting to tackle the problem, after receiving requests for help from some of the parents of children caught up with the gangs in her constituency.

According to some of the mothers, a fear of being branded racist makes many of the police and social services reluctant to investigate the crimes as organised and connected. One mother from Rotherham, whose 14-year-old daughter was groomed into prostitution and multiply raped during a 12-month period, told me that almost every man convicted of these crimes in the north of England is from Pakistan but that the authorities insist that it is not relevant.

There are, however, a growing number of individuals within the Muslim communities who are willing to speak out against the criminals. Mohammed Shafiq, the director of the Lancashire-based Ramadhan Foundation, a charity working for peaceful harmony between different ethnic communities, advocates better education about sexual exploitation to be disseminated through imams and other community leaders.

« I was one of the first within the Muslim community to speak out about this, four years ago, » says Shafiq, « and at the time I received death threats from some black and Asian people. But what I said has been proved right — that if we didn’t tackle it there would be more of these abusers and more girls getting harmed. »

Shafiq says he is « disgusted » to hear some perpetrators refer to their victims as « white trash ». He adds: « I say to them, would you treat your sister or daughter like this? »

Joyce Thacker, the strategic director of the children and young people’s services directorate at Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council, has a vast amount of experience in dealing with sexual exploitation of young people. She says that it is « interesting » to note that most of the men involved are Asian but that it is primarily an issue of the abuse of children by older men.

« What about the younger boys who are sent to befriend the girls in the first place? » says Thacker, « Are they also victims of abuse? Certainly we need to ensure that more work is done within all communities that explores positive, healthy relationships, or these young men may end up being the abusers themselves. »

Rotherham-based Apna Haq offers support for women and their children suffering domestic abuse. Its director Zlakha Ahmed told me that much of the community express their disgust at what came out in the recent trial in private and that there needs to be more public discussion of the issues. « This abuse is appalling and needs to be raised within the community. There are still people denying that it happens so the more of us who speak out about it the better. »

Emma Jackson is now 22 and devotes much of her time raising awareness about grooming networks among child-protection workers, police officers and the general community. Much remains to be done, she says, to end the complacency in dealing with the criminal gangs. « I didn’t have much help from police or agencies because grooming and sexual exploitation had not been recognised and understood when it happened to me. Now it has, I think it’s important that all agencies work together to protect these children and their families to help stamp out the problem. »

These gangs will be allowed to operate with impunity if we deny their existence in some sort of twisted attempt to be anti-racist and culturally sensitive. Some people, including many white liberals, are loath to admit what it is going on. If we do not tackle the problem head-on, and work together to combat this dreadful abuse of children, the only beneficiaries will be the extremists.

I’m a Rotherham grooming gang survivor. I call myself a survivor because I’m still alive. I’m part of the UK’s largest ever child sexual abuse investigation.

As a teenager, I was taken to various houses and flats above takeaways in the north of England, to be beaten, tortured and raped over 100 times. I was called a “white slag” and “white c***” as they beat me.

They made it clear that because I was a non-Muslim, and not a virgin, and because I didn’t dress “modestly”, that they believed I deserved to be “punished”. They said I had to “obey” or be beaten.

Fear of being killed, and threats to my parents’ lives, made it impossible for me to escape for about a year. The police didn’t help me.

As I write this, it has been widely reported that a letter has been sent to Muslim groups around the country declaring a national “Punish a Muslim” day; elsewhere, the leaders of Britain First have been found guilty of religiously aggravated harassment.

In mainland Europe, conflict surrounding immigrants and refugees has been fuelled by stories of women being raped by migrants. People have been calling for violent attacks against “any Muslims” and have declared “war on Islam”.

Islamophobic online hate and personal attacks occur every day. In response, anti-fascist groups and the “far left” have carried out their own violent attacks on groups they perceive to comprise “white supremacists” or “Nazis”.

As someone who has experienced life inside a grooming gang, I can tell you with certainty that none of this is likely to make any difference to the behaviours of groomers. Like terrorists, they firmly believe that the crimes they carry out are justified by their religious beliefs.

If anything, rising anti-Muslim hate will probably make groomers stronger in their convictions, and drive ordinary young Muslim men towards fundamentalism, grooming gangs and terrorism. The camaraderie, protection, money, and kudos that these groups offer, makes them a strong pull for anyone. Worryingly, several young men I have spoken to joke that being a gangster and going to jail are their “life goals”.

However big or small the problem of grooming gang crime is, it is big enough to warrant national concern, not only because of the severity of crimes, but because of the degree of terror and threats to life involved. This really does devastate lives, families and communities. We don’t even talk about the non-survivors.

Experts say that grooming gangs are not the same as paedophile rings. It’s something that central Government really needs to understand in order to prevent more grooming gang crime in the future.

In November 2017, the Swedish government held a meeting where they stated that: “Sexual violence is being used as a tactic of terrorism”, and as such, it was recognised as a threat to Sweden’s national security.

The link between terrorism and rape undertaken by Islamist gangs was not being ignored. They called for counter-extremism education. This sounds like a balanced and intelligent governmental response to me.

Religious indoctrination is a big part of the process of getting young men involved in grooming gang crime. Religious ideas about purity, virginity, modesty and obedience are taken to the extreme until horrific abuse becomes the norm. It was taught to me as a concept of “othering”.

“Muslim girls are good and pure because they dress modestly, covering down to their ankles and wrists, and covering their crotch area. They stay virgins until marriage. They are our girls.

« White girls and non-Muslim girls are bad because you dress like slags. You show the curves of your bodies (showing the gap between your thighs means you’re asking for it) and therefore you’re immoral. White girls sleep with hundreds of men. You are the other girls. You are worthless and you deserve to be gang-raped.”

This hateful religious hypocrisy strikes people to their very core. But it’s far from unique. My main perpetrator quoted scriptures from the Quran to me as he beat me. However, almost identical scriptures (about the stoning to death of virgins who don’t scream when they are raped) can also be found in the Bible.

The problem isn’t the text itself; it’s how it’s fundamentally interpreted. In fact, there are many cases of Bible quotes being used to justify terrible human injustices, like the enslavement of people from Africa, antisemitism and violence towards LGBT+ people.

All the major world religions, including Hinduism and Buddhism, have also at some time been associated with extreme human rights abuses against men, women and children.

I experienced horrific, religiously sanctioned sexual violence and torture – so I definitely believe that we need to be aware of religious extremism as something potentially harmful, so that we can protect people from it.

But for Tommy Robinson and his followers to focus on an entire religion, based on the cruel interpretations of some scriptures by some people, is unhelpful, to say the least. Many of his religious theories and conjecture are not anything that I can relate to in my real life experiences.

Most grooming gang survivors I know absolutely condemn anti-Islamic hate, and we’re uncomfortable with English Defence League protests. We certainly don’t want random attacks on “all Muslims”. You can’t cure harm with more harm. Free-thinking men from Pakistani Muslim backgrounds, like Nazir Afzal, agree, and many deal with all of this incredibly graciously.

As a Rotherham grooming gang survivor, I am told that both child protection services and the prosecution of offenders is improving in most areas. But frustratingly, prevention hasn’t really begun.

I witnessed the ways young men are groomed to become perpetrators by older grooming gang members. It’s very similar to the tactics used in grooming for terrorism, with love-bombing, emotive language (“brother”, “cuz”, “blud”), and promises of wealth and fame, then humiliation, controlling with guilt and shame, training with weapons, and instilling hate and fear of outsiders.

Always, at the same time, they continue to convince these young men that they must find girls to be gang-raped too.

Grooming gang crime is upheld by religious extremism. Like Sweden, we must officially recognise this, and work to curb extremist preaching, teach religious counter-narratives, give gendered extremism education and deliver quality relationships education, while learning the lessons from Prevent and Channel. We need a careful, considered approach that is respectful of the human rights of everyone.

A man who drove a van into a crowd of Muslims near a London mosque has been found guilty of murder.

Darren Osborne, 48, ploughed into people in Finsbury Park in June last year, killing Makram Ali, 51, and injuring nine others.

Osborne, from Cardiff, was also found guilty of attempted murder and is due to be sentenced on Friday.

Prosecutors said they were « clear throughout that this was a terrorist attack ».

The jury took an hour to return the verdict at Woolwich Crown Court after a nine day trial.

Sue Hemming, from the Crown Prosecution Service, said: « Darren Osborne planned and carried out this attack because of his hatred of Muslims. He must now face the consequences of his actions. »

Cdr Dean Haydon from the Metropolitan Police said: « Osborne’s evil and cowardly actions meant a family has tragically lost a husband, father and grandfather. »

Some of those injured « could suffer from health issues for the rest of their lives », he added.

Jurors heard the area outside the Muslim Welfare House had been busy with worshippers attending Ramadan prayers on 19 June.

Mr Ali had collapsed at the roadside in the minutes before the attack.

Several of those who went to help him said he was alive and conscious in the moments before being struck by the van.

Osborne drove the van into the crowd at about 00:15. Jurors were told the van only stopped when it hit some bollards.

He then got out of the van and ran towards the crowd.

Police later found a letter in the van written by Osborne, referring to Muslim people as « rapists » and « feral ».

He also wrote that Muslim men were « preying on our children ».

The trial heard Osborne became « obsessed » with Muslims in the weeks leading up to the attack, having watched the BBC drama Three Girls, about the Rochdale grooming scandal.

Analysis

Dominic Casciani, BBC home affairs correspondent

In just a few weeks, Darren Osborne went from a troubled, angry and unpredictably violent alcoholic to a killer driven by ideology.

The rapid radicalisation – the way he became fixated on the idea that Muslims in Britain were some kind of nation within a nation, is one of the most shocking parts of this awful crime.

The sources of that radicalisation, including his obsession with a television programme about the Rochdale abuse scandal, show how difficult it is to predict who will become a danger to society.

But the fact that he smiled contentedly after he had run over and killed Makram Ali proved to the jury that his motive was ideological.

Osborne is not the first terrorist to have radicalised so quickly. In 2014, a young man who was groomed by Islamists went through a similarly rapid change.

The speed at which these men and others went from a change of mindset to planning an attack is one of the issues that most concerns the security services.

Osborne told the court he had originally hired the van to kill Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn at a march he was due to attend.

He said it « would have been even better » if London Mayor Sadiq Khan had been present, adding: « It would have been like winning the lottery. »

Responding to the verdict, Mr Corbyn – who is MP for the area where the attack took place – said it was « a hate-filled attack that… shocked us all ».

« I was proud of how, in the wake of this terrible event, we all came together to reject hate and embrace hope, and that is the kind of country we live in, » he added.

‘Loner and alcoholic’

A statement from his partner Sarah Andrews, read out in court, said he seemed « brainwashed » and « totally obsessed ».

Ms Andrews – who had been in a relationship with Mr Osborne for about 20 years and with whom she had four children – described him as a « loner and a functioning alcoholic » with an « unpredictable temperament ».

Osborne started following Tommy Robinson, one of the founders of the English Defence League (EDL), and other far-right leaders on social media, in the fortnight before the attack.

Mr Robinson sent him a group email saying: « There is a nation within a nation forming beneath the surface of the UK. It is a nation built on hatred, on violence and on Islam. »

Cdr Haydon said the investigation had the « full weight » of the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command behind it.

He warned that online material had played a « significant role » in how Osborne was radicalised and « brainwashed ».

If Osborne’s aim had been to « create divisions and hate between communities », then he had « failed », he said.

« The response [of those involved], and the overwhelmingly positive reaction my officers and teams have witnessed since, highlights how far from reality Osborne’s sick and twisted views really are, » he added.

‘Scars will stay’

The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) welcomed the verdict, but added: « We cannot be complacent and regard this as a one-off terrorist incident. »

Harun Khan, secretary general of the MCB, said: « The scenes we witnessed last summer were the most violent manifestation of Islamophobia yet in our country.

« The case tells us that we must all exercise caution when tempted to stigmatise any group of people, regardless of colour, creed or community. »

Khalid Oumar, a trustee of the mosque and founder of the Finsbury Park Attack victims’ voice forum, praised the strength of the community, adding: « The scars will stay with them forever, but the community is determined to go about daily life without fear and to stand together against victimisation and violence. »

She was appalled that the city’s campaign to reduce sexually transmitted diseases allows kids as young as 11 to get free condoms via mail-order from the Public Health Department. Eleven!

Go to the website www.takecontrolphilly.org and see for yourself. Be warned: The site contains very straightforward info, including explicit animations illustrating the proper way to don or insert a condom.

« Every girl is different, » the website notes in its instructions on female-condom use. « Figure out what position works for you. You can stand with one foot on a chair, sit on the edge of a chair, lie down, squat, or for fun, have your partner help you out. »

The idea of an 11-year-old reading this makes me want to cry.

« As a parent, I am personally outraged, » wrote my friend, who has a 14-year-old. « What’s the back story on this campaign? What is it telling our youth? I get the sex-education thing for kids in schools, but mail-order condoms for 11-year-olds??? It’s shocking to me. »

We don’t know the half of what’s going on out there.

Depress us, Gary Bell.

« We do more workshops in middle schools than in high schools, » says Bell, executive director of Bebashi-Transition to Hope, the local nonprofit that works on prevention of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. « Teachers call us because their kids are acting out sexually. They’ll catch them in the bathroom or the stairwell. They hear that kids are cutting schools to have orgies. »

Good Lord. Orgies?

« Yes, indeed, » says Bell. « It’s sad. It’s horrifying. »

But no longer startling to those on the front lines of adolescent sexuality.

« We follow 200 teenagers with HIV, and the youngest is 12, » says Jill Foster, director of the Dorothy Mann Center for Pediatric and Adolescent HIV at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. « When we started doing HIV treatment in 1998, the average age of patients was 16 or 17. The first time we got a 13-year-old was mind-blowing. »

Now, Foster and her colleagues barely twitch when a child barely in his or her teens tests positive for HIV.

Because a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified Philadelphia as having the earliest age of sexual initiation – 13 – among cities participating in the study, she says, it’s crucial to make condoms available to younger kids.

People gasp at that, says Foster, who diagnoses new HIV cases at a rate of two to three teens a month, up from one every four months just a decade ago.

« But people have no idea how tough it is to be a kid who’s exposed to sexual media images and peer pressure. It’s routine for 12- and 13-year-olds to talk about sex. Younger kids hear them and they want to be part of that ‘older’ world, » she says.

« They don’t have maturity or impulse control, so if we can get them to have condoms with them when they start having sex, they are going to be safer.

« I wish it weren’t necessary, » she says. « Unfortunately, it is. »

It would be easy to play the « appalled citizen » card and decry the inclusion of kids as young as 11 in Philadelphia’s STD-prevention campaign. But I won’t. Because there are two groups of children in this city:

Those lucky enough to have at least one caring, available adult to guide them through sex-charged adolescence.

And those left on their own.

Like the child being raised by a single mom whose two jobs keep her from supervising her child. Or the kids being raised by a tired grandmom who’s asleep by 9 and doesn’t know that the kids have snuck out of the house.

Or the homeless teen who crashes on couches and must choose between saying no to a friend’s creepy uncle or wandering the streets at night.

These kids deserve protection from the fallout of STDs and unplanned pregnancy as much as kids from « good » families do – kids who, by the way, get in trouble, too. They just have more support to get them through it.

« We know that sexual activity in young adolescents doesn’t change overnight, » says Donald Schwarz, a physician who worked with adolescents for years at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia before being appointed city health commissioner in 2008. « But children need to be protected while we get our heads around whatever the long-term strategies should be here. »

He mentions a recent, awful survey of sixth-graders in West Philly, which showed that 25 percent of the children, who were just 11 years old, had had sex.

« Clearly, we don’t think it’s OK for 11-year-olds to be having sex, » says Schwarz. « But we don’t have the infrastructure in place to fix [that] problem fast. We can, however, make condoms available fairly quickly to whoever needs them.

« I don’t have all the answers on this, » says Schwarz. « But I do think in economic terms. I think that jobs and education are the key to turning this ship. But it will take time and hard work in a period when the city is struggling financially. »

There are no easy solutions. This is a complicated problem, exacerbated by generational poverty and family collapse that paralyzes our cities in ways too myriad to address in one column.

Like I said, thinking about it makes me want to cry.

But that’s not a good enough reason to keep condoms out of the backpacks of 11-year-olds who will be sexually active whether we like it or not.

Voir de même:

Free condoms at school don’t always help teen girls avoid pregnancy and when given out can actually INCREASE fertility rates
Access to condoms in school increases teen fertility rates by about 10 per cent according to a new study
However giving teens counseling in addition to birth control could have the opposite effect, Notre Dame researchers found
Access to other kinds of birth control has been shown to lower teen fertility rate – or do nothing at all
But condoms might have a different effect because of their failure rate and the time and frequency at which they’re used
Access to free condoms in high schools could have led to two extra births per 1,000 teenage women so far
Clemence Michallon

The Daily mail

4 July 2016

Giving out free condoms at school is not a surefire way to avoid teenage pregnancy – or it might not be enough.

Access to condoms in schools increases teen fertility rates by about 10 per cent, according to a new study by the University Of Notre Dame.

However the increase happened in schools where no counseling was provided when condoms were given out – and giving out guidance as well as birth control could have the opposite effect, economists Kasey Buckles and Daniel Hungerman said in the study.

Access to other kinds of birth control, such as the contraceptive pill, IUDs and implants, has been shown to lower teen fertility rates – but condoms might have opposite consequences due to their failure rate as well as the time and frequency at which they’re used.

Access to condoms in schools increases teen fertility by about 10 per cent, according to a new study by the University Of Notre Dame (file picture)
Buckles and Hungerman looked at 22 school districts located in 12 different states, using data from the 1990s.
Times have changed already and teenagers today are overall less likely to have sex and less likely to become pregnant, they wrote.

Most of the free condoms programs in the study began in 1992 or 1993 and about two thirds involved mandatory counseling.

The 10 per cent increased occurred as a result of schools that gave out condoms without counseling, Buckles and Hungerman said.

‘These fertility effects may have been attenuated, or perhaps even reversed, when counseling was mandated as part of condom provision,’ they wrote.

Teenage girls were also more likely to develop gonorrhea when condoms were given for free – and again, the increase happened as a result of schools giving out condoms without counseling.

Access to contraceptives in general has been shown to lower teen fertility, Buckles and Hungerman noted, or in some cases had no effect at all.

But condoms might have a different impact because of several factors, such as the fact that their failure rate is more important than that of other contraceptives.

Condoms also rely ‘more heavily on the male partner’, which is an important factor given that an unplanned pregnancy will have different consequences for each gender, Buckle and Hungerman wrote.

The time at which condoms are used could also explain why they have a different impact than other types of birth control. Condoms have to be used at the time of intercourse, whereas the pill, IUDs and implants are all taken in advance.

Using condoms also results from a short-term decision rather than long-term.

Free condom programs in schools could have led to two additional births per 1,000 teenage women so far, Buckle and Hungerman found.

This could increase to 5 extra births per 1,000 teenage girls if the country’s entire high-school-aged population had access to condoms.

Condom distribution programs could promote the use of condoms over more efficient birth control methods, drive schools to use their resources for condom distribution rather than more effective programs, or might encourage ‘risky’ sexual behaviors, Buckle and Hungerman wrote.

But these findings should be used with caution when reflecting on policy proposals, they added.

Health clinics based in schools that offered contraceptives were shown to significantly lower teen fertility in a 2014 study.

‘If health clinics can effectively combine contraception access and counseling, this may lead to very different effects than access alone,’ Buckle and Hungerman said.

As Rohloff and Wright (2010) point out, the concept of ‘moral panic’ has several problems. The first one is the problem of normativity. Since its introduction the concept has been used as a form of social critique where panics were characterised as social reactions that are ‘irrational’ and misdirected (Rohloff and Wright, 2010). Hier (2002a) argues that it is the concept’s normativity that has made it unappealing to newer developments in social theory. Second comes the problem of temporality, according to which moral panics can be characterized as short-lived episodes (exceptions are Hall et al.’s (1978) analysis of the mugging panic and Jenkins’ (1998) study on child molestation). In other words, the moral panics studied do not focus on the historically structured processes that have an impact on the development of the moral panics in the first place. Subsequent revisions have led to the acknowledgement of the necessity for a time-frame and contextual analysis: ‘…Moral panics are a crucial element of the fabric of social change. They are not marginal, exotic, trivial phenomena, but one key by which we can unlock the mysteries of social life…’ (Goode and Ben – Yehuda, 1994: 229). The third problem is the one of (un)intentionality which ultimately is concerned with the question of responsibility. In Cohen’s (1972) original analysis, the moral panic surrounding the mods and the rockers was presented as unintended and unanticipated, with focus being placed on the media as medium for deviancy amplification and stigmatization. In contrast, the analysis of the mugging moral panic (Hall et al. 1978) presented the scare as a strategy on behalf of the ruling elites in order to divert public attention from the crisis in the capitalist system. Last but not least, Goode and Ben-Yehuda (1994) constructed the problem as one of intentional actions versus unintentional developments. Their approach distinguished between grassroots, interest groups and elite- engineered moral panics.

The first model based the problem onto sentiments that were present in society in the general. The second model suggested that the reaction should be considered as an outcome of the efforts of specific moral entrepreneurs and particular interest groups in society. The last model, the elite-engineered panic, was presented as a deliberated organised propaganda campaign aimed at diverting attention from real structural problems. Revision of these ‘ideal types’ (ibid.) of moral panics have moved towards the more rigorous appreciation of the plurality of reactions that might accompany the process of moral assertion and an appreciation of the resistance efforts which might occur in line with the panics (Hier, 2002b; McRobbie & Thorton, 1995; de Young, 2004). Even with such contribution being made, the concept has been criticised for falling short of providing alternative means of explanation and theorisation (Hier, 2008).

Attempts have been made to tackle the ‘heuristic’ nature of the concept by incorporating the developments in risk theory and the works of Norbert Elias (Rohloff and Wright, 2010). A fourth problem is the one of anthropomorphizing. The claim that a society can engage in hysterical, panic-stricken behaviour has been criticised on the grounds that collective social processes cannot be rendered as individual psychological ones. Some of the earlier analyses of moral panics discussed ‘society’ and ‘social reaction’ as if they were unified and undifferentiated, when in fact the interests of the police, the media and the public were quite different (McRobbie and Thornton, 1995). Another problem, outlined by Garland (2008) is concerned with the ethics of attribution, according to which the critical ascriptions which the concept carries also have an impact on its use. This creates situations in which the conditions for the analysis of a moral panic exist, but due to ethical consideration such an inquiry is not pursued. An example is the post- 9/11 response of the media and the government (ibid.).

The aftermath of the tragedy contained all the necessary conditions included in the definition of the concept – expressed concern, hostility, disproportionality, consensus and a moral dimension was attached to all of the above, yet the episode itself was not categorised as a moral panic. The commentators involved into the analysis of the terrorist attack avoid the use of the term and considerable caution was exercised when discussing the event (Walker, 2002). According to Garland (2008) one explanation is the widespread uncertai nty of the nature of the attack itself. Secondly, and what he considers more important, the reluctance of applying the label ‘successfully’ was based on ethical reasons. The use of the concept would clash with the prevailing moral sentiments of fear and grief that drove the reaction to the attack.

Thus it took some time for the first academic publication considering the post- 9/11 as an example of a moral panic to be published (Rothe and Muzzatti, 2004; Welch, 2006). Even though Garland (2008) himself notes that the ethical inhibitors might not be as important, they will have some impact on the way in which tragedies and disasters are approached by ‘moral panic’ scholars. What it shows, however, is the relationship that exists between the analysts and the social actors and the way in which they influence each other. It has been Cohen’s longstanding contention that the term moral panic is, for its utility, problematic insofar as the term ‘panic’ implies an irrational reaction which a researcher is rejecting in the very act of labelling it such. That was the case when he was studying the media coverage of the Mods and Rockers and when Young was studying the reaction to drug taking in the late 1960s and the early 1970s.

Currently , Cohen has started to feel uncomfortable with the blanket application the term ’panic’ in the study of any reactions to deviance, as he argues for its possible use in ‘good moral panics’ (Cohen, 2002: xxxi – xxxv). Cohen (2011) discusses the changes that h ave occurred in society and how this has had re – directed the ‘moral panic’ analysis and has contributed to the development of the concept. To begin with, the modern moral entrepreneurs have adopted a status similar to the social analyst (in terms of class, education and ideology) and the likelihood for the two of them to perceive the problem in the same way has increased substantially. Secondly, the alliances between the various political forces has become more flexible and as a result, panics about ‘genuin e’ victims (of natural disasters or terrorist attacks) are more likely to generate consensus that the ‘unworthy’ victims (the homeless). Thirdly, whereas the traditional moral panics where in nature elite – engineered, the contemporary ones are much more lik ely to populist – based, giving more space for social movements’ and victims’ participation in the process. Fourthly, in contrast to the old moral panics, the new ones are interventionist – focused.

The new criminalizers (Cohen, 1988) who address the moral panics are either post – liberals who share a common background with a decriminalized generation, or are from the new right who argue for increased focus on private morality (sexuality, abortion, lifestyle). In addition, Cohen (2011) considers the possibility of certain moral panics being understood as ‘anti – denial’ movements. In contemporary times the denial of certain events, their cover – up, evasion and tolerance is perceived as morally wrong, and such denied realities should be brought to the public attentio n, which would result in widespread moral condemnation and denunciation. In this sense, it could be argued that certain panics should also be considered as ‘acceptable’ and thus a binarity between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ moral panics can be developed. Such as heu ristic between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ can be useful as such a distinction in effect widens the scope of moral panic studies beyond those examples that are regarded as ‘inappropriate’ and ‘irrational’. Potentially, this could also lead to the questioning of the notions of rationality, disproportionality and other normative judgements that have characterised the studies of moral panics. Such an approach of analysing ‘moral panics’ is in contrast with the work of Critcher (2003, 2009; 2011), to whom the concept of can be best understood in the relations of power and regulation.

Whereas both Critcher and Cohen agree that each moral panic should be seen in a wider conceptual framework, the latter does not adopt Critcher’s suggestion that the term ‘moral’ panic should not be applied in cases where dominant elites reinforce dominant practices by way of scapegoating outsiders. By contrast to Critcher, Cohen accepts the possibility of counter – hegemonic moral panics. In addition, Critcher stresses the need to focus not only on the politics of moral panics, but also consider the economic factors that might limit or promote their development. Moving beyond moral panics, Hunt (1999 ) has argued that a shift has taken place in the processes of moral regulation over the past centu ry, whereby the boundaries that separate morality from immorality have been blurred. As a result, an increasing number of everyday activities have become moralized and the expression of such moralization can be found in hybrid configurations of risk and harm. The moralization of everyday life contains a dialectic that counterposes individualizing discourses against collectivizing discourses and moralization has become an increasingly common feature of contemporary political discourse (Garland, 2001; Biressi and Nunn, 2003; Haggerty, 2003).

Moral panics (Hier, 2002a, 2008) can also be seen as volatile manifestations of an ongoing project of moral regulation, where the ‘moral’ is represented as practices that are specifically designed to promote the care of th e self. With the shift towards neo – liberalism, such regulatory scripts have taken the form of discourses of risk, harm and personal responsibility. As Hier (2008) the implementation of such a ‘personalization’ discourse is not straightforward due to the fa ct that moral callings are not always accepted. The moral codes that are supposed to regulate behaviour , expression and self – presentation are themselves contestable and their operation is not bound in a time – space frame. Thus, ‘moralization’ is conceptualized as a recurrent sequence of attempts to negotiate social life; a temporary ‘crisis’ of the ‘code’ (moral panic) is therefore far more routine than extraordinary. The problems with such an argument for expanding the focus of moral panics to encompass for ms of moral regulation is that it is too broad (Critcher, 2009) and a more specific scope of moral regulation should be defined in order to conduct such analysis.

Conclusion

The aim of the following paper was to provide an overview of the concept of ‘moral panics’ and the possibility for applying its analytical tools in the study of ‘good moral panics’. As the focus of the concept was expanded significantly over the past 40 years, it can be argued that such a task is within the scope of academia due the cha nging nature of the contemporary world and social relation. In fact, in such a world full of insecurity and one that is characterized by a constant fear of falling (Young, 2007a) such an approach of putting reality on trial would be much appreciated.